He felt devoid of words, after being surrounded by them for the past 48 hours. As a writer there was this constant itch that one should be in thrall to the urge to write. It was what writers did, when they were not talking, or listening to others talk, as you do, sitting on the train, listening to the talk of others.
He was so easily seduced by the roll and pace of words spoken with intent. The voice reading on the radio, that book at bedtime, that well-scripted introduction. He felt this might be part of the reason he liked to start the public day by attending the Morning Office in his city’s cathedral, just a short walk from his studio; this elevation of the written to word to the spoken, deliberate utterance that lifted those yards of printed text in the book on the lectern he occasionally had the privilege to read out loud. It had been the book of Amos this week. Not a text he knew, and yet he had been surprised. He had meant to look up the chapters read when he returned to his desk – but hadn’t. Only now, early this morning as the streets below were swept in the city, and the night’s young revellers were returning home in the waiting white taxis, he read the words of Amos, of his 8th Century (BCE) vision and prophesy. It was dark stuff, warnings of doom, disaster couched in language that whilst poetic had a hard edge; not the poetry of the Psalms . . . but some verses had caught him:
Behold, I am pressed under you, as a cart is pressed that is full of sheaves. Therefore the flight shall perish from the swift, and the strong shall not strengthen his force, neither shall the mighty deliver himself: Neither shall he stand that handleth the bow; and he that is swift of foot shall not deliver himself: neither shall he that rideth the horse deliver himself. And he that is courageous among the mighty shall flee away naked in that day, saith the LORD.
He had walked away into the morning city, the city preparing itself for a weekday of shopping and business, and found himself saying under his breath the flight shall perish from the swift. It was such a powerful image: he saw in his mind’s eye the swifts quartering the field below his cottage on that Welsh mountain as they sought food for their young nested in a dark corner of the barn, their nest a marvel of nature’s engineering hanging high from the wall. He saw their flight perish, saw these miracle birds fall from the sky. He felt the silence of the empty field. He was suddenly overwhelmed by the thought of a silencing of birds, their flights stilled, perished in some Armageddon.
And later that week two hundred and fifty miles south under the lush greenness of the tree canopies on that Devon road to Buckfastleigh, these words had reappeared as though in some recurring litany. He had looked from the speeding car into the early morning, and, following the river running beside the road, had remembered a morning past. Beside that very river he had crouched close in wonder at it all, and that he had almost slept the night through in her arms, by her side, alive to her every movement and breath, and to wake, and find it all true and not dreamt.
He had had no poetry for that morning past. He was sure he had found something later, of their days together there. Her passionate kiss in the gardens at Hestercombe, the rub and touch of her leg under a restaurant table, her beauty a shining star beside him at that gallery opening, lying together amongst daisies in the garden he had recited the poetry of Alice Oswald, and the blue skies, and the distant moorland glimpsed, and his heart pounding with love and passion for this gentle figure who he couldn’t help himself touch and kiss, whose hand he would seek and hold at every turn . . .
How could he not be a poet when he had known such things he had only previously imagined? And now he had become a person whose words others listened to and read. Because? If pressed, he might say he had been woken into a world he had only previously glimpsed, occasional revelations had come fleetingly, but now they were ever present. It was as if when he looked into her face he would step into a place where she belonged, a place she was still fashioning for herself, where she dreamed herself to be, and he would be, possibly, and possibly always. It was always too much to think of when he was alone.
He missed her terribly as he walked the gardens he had once walked with her, had sat and sketched with her, had stood at slight distances from her to savour her still beauty. But there was no escaping the words, the needs of words, the talk, the idle talk he couldn’t do. And now, home at his desk and the backlit screen, the persistent noise of this city he inhabited reluctantly, he was devoid of words and yet, and yet. At five o’clock this morning he had filled his favourite china cup with his favoured blend of tea, his morning tea cup decorated with its traditional Chinese blue on white pattern of temples, bridges and trees and given himself time with book. It was Farwell Song by Rabindranath Tagore, that great Indian writer who he remembered had walked those gardens with Leonard and Dorothy, those Elmhirsts who had made the gardens what they are today. Tagore, a writer courted for his wisdom and passion for rural reconstruction, a friend of Gandhi, Einstein, W.B. Yeats. Such people, he thought, and I have walked amongst their ghosts, in this place that twenty five years earlier had laid its spell on him, and he had loved, and come to love with even more devotion because he could not think of the peace and loveliness of it all without her presence there. And yet they were apart, and she had her life, and he had his life, but through the poetry of their respective endeavors, their art making, their creative energy, they came together in what he felt was a similar spirit.
In the hour before his train had left for the South West a letter had arrived with two cards. On one card, sewn into the card, a eucalyptus leaf, sewn with eucalyptus-dyed thread, and with it a blank card for ‘something in return; something personal, gentle, tentative, appropriate to our lives’.
He had carried both cards with him, these cards of papier aquarelle (300gsm) that had graced her touch, been held by her deft fingers. He had placed them between the leaves of his poetry book, a book he used exclusively for his written words. He had placed the card with the leaf resting against a vase of Lathyrsu odoratus. Vase and card placed on the pine desk in a guest room in a friend’s house they had remained in place, together, those two nights, and he recalled holding the leafed card briefly before he turned out the light to lay down to sleep, thinking only of her as he waited for sleep to embrace him.
